Why are autocrats so fixated on trans people?

LGBTQ scapegoating and the authoritarian playbook

In June of last year, Donald Trump promised that if elected he’d end federal funding to schools that teach “transgender insanity,” an assurance his audience greeted with a standing ovation. Trump couldn’t help but register his surprise at the raucous applause: “It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that. I’m talking about cutting taxes, people go like that,” he said as he clapped politely. “I talk about transgender, everyone goes crazy. Who would have thought? Five years ago, you didn’t know what the hell it was.” 

His honesty is revealing. The ever-opportunistic authoritarian faction is placing calculated emphasis on transgender issues, and recent attacks have all the hallmarks of the scapegoating tactics deployed by would-be autocrats around the world. 

This is the key insight of a comprehensive new report by Over Zero, which documents the connection between LGBTQ scapegoating and threats to democracy. The report explains how LGBTQ scapegoating can be used to facilitate authoritarianism, supported by international case studies and informed by expert interviews. (Over Zero has been an essential source of communications research and analysis in our dangerous times; they’ve issued expert guidance on how to de-escalate and build resiliency to political violence; methods for communicating about political violence and countering misinformation; and more.)

How does scapegoating fit into the authoritarian playbook?

Over Zero’s new report builds on Protect Democracy’s The Authoritarian Playbook, which describes seven common tactics deployed by autocrats and offers a framework for distinguishing authoritarian-style approaches from politics as usual. One of those seven tactics is scapegoating vulnerable communities. Over Zero defines scapegoating as naming a crisis — factual or fictional — and blaming a minority group for the problem. 

As The Authoritarian Playbook explains, “autocrats use demographic identity as a way to sow division. This tactic also allows autocrats to claim a broad mandate after coming to power with only plurality support.” The creation of a guilty, threatening “them” helps mold an innocent, virtuous “us” in need of protection. The resultant antagonism, rife with anxiety, anger, and fear, creates a permission structure for measures that chip away at the foundations of democracy.

Consider, for example, our colleague Amanda Carpenter’s analysis of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban:

While Orban returned to office in 2010 by harnessing economic discontent at the peak of the financial crisis, he has built an enduring and riled-up populist base by scapegoating immigrants and refugees … Orban has been widely condemned for his remarks that diverse European nations are “no longer nations, they are nothing more than a conglomeration of peoples.” He went on: “We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become mixed race.”

Orban’s government used the 2015 refugee crisis to introduce a “state of emergency caused by mass migration,” which is still in place nine years later. This is a classic move: stoking fear at the expense of a vulnerable community to permanently expand state power, to be used and abused at the autocrat’s discretion.

How to identify LGBTQ scapegoating

LGBTQ scapegoating often takes shape through the lie that queer and trans people are groomers and pedophiles, intent on abusing children. Returning to Orban for a moment: This tactic helped his rightwing Fidesz party build out immense powers of censorship and media control. As the Over Zero report documents:

In 2021 Hungary passed a “child protection” law prohibiting the “depiction or promotion” of LGBTQ people in television, films, advertisements, literature, and education programs available to minors. The law was passed at the urging of Prime Minister Orban’s government “to protect children” and broadly conflates homosexuality with pedophilia…

Of course, it’s not news that autocrats turn to scapegoating to consolidate their power. But how do we know when it’s happening? The key contribution of Over Zero’s report is a new framework to identify LGBTQ scapegoating, complete with a worksheet of core considerations to help make the assessment:

• Societal threat: Is an entire group being accused of being a threat to society (e.g., a threat to children, families, or a way of life)?

• Scapegoating linguistics: Are antagonists using “us vs. them” framing to paint themselves as the real victims? Are they using a hostile label (e.g., “groomers”) or violent metaphors that support the threatening labels (e.g., “LGBT invasion”) and dispossess the group of its humanity (e.g., “rainbow plague”)?

• Authoritarian playbook context: Is the attack being deployed alongside other authoritarian tactics, like stoking violence, spreading disinformation, quashing dissent and/or aggrandizing executive power? 

• Global precedent: Does the campaign mirror attempts to subvert democracy through LGBTQ scapegoating in other countries?

• Rapid legislative action: Is the attack being used to quickly pass laws impacting a vulnerable group, especially in the absence of serious policy debate?

These key considerations can help clarify what is and isn’t autocratic scapegoating targeted at LGBTQ people. This framework makes clear that there’s ample space in democratic political and legal institutions to debate and resolve policy questions without veering into authoritarian scapegoating. But if a faction is declaring an entire group a threat to society; dispossessing them of humanity; replicating the actions of autocrats the world over; or taking other steps described in Over Zero’s framework, chances are there are implications for democracy itself.

Scapegoating and power

Scapegoating isn’t a simple matter of political mobilization or electoral strategy. It has as much to do with autocrats abusing power as it does with autocrats gaining power.

Donald Trump’s campaign promise to withhold funding from public schools promoting what he calls “transgender insanity” is right out of The Authoritarian Playbook: aggrandizing executive authority by abusing the regulatory and spending power of the state to control speech and undercut disfavored public institutions. 

Governor Ron DeSantis has, of course, pioneered a version of this approach in Florida under the Don’t Say Gay law. The law does more than just target the LGBTQ community; its self-professed political aim is to dictate the permissible terms of speech, teaching, and study in public education more broadly, and create a mechanism of punishment for disobedient dissenters.

Autocrats the world over combine scapegoating with other authoritarian tactics once in power. Putin, for example, has weaponized LGBTQ scapegoating to justify censorship, the erosion of civil liberties, and even his war against Ukraine. Per the Over Zero report:

[I]n December 2023 Putin expanded Russia’s 2013 ban on “gay propaganda,” criminalizing depictions of LGBTQ people, banning gender affirming care, and “information that can make children want to change their sex.” The 2023 law was an expansion of the 2013 ban that applied only to what minors might see … Its passage comes amid Russia’s war in Ukraine and is the centerpiece of its war propaganda to “protect traditional values” from the West. It effectively criminalized all physical and online spaces, public and private, where LGBTQ people might associate. The bill was passed at the same moment all forms of dissent against the war and Putin were outlawed.

Running toward an imagined past

Over Zero’s report also explains how scapegoating is fundamental to the very DNA of the autocratic faction, since it goes hand in hand with “restorative nostalgia.” This nostalgia entails an imagined, idealized past — which has since been corrupted by LGBTQ people and other minorities — that must be returned to, no matter the cost. For the autocratic faction, preserving the democracy of the present and building the democracy of the future stand in the way of turning back time to an uncorrupted fantasy.

It’s incumbent on all of us — journalists covering democracy, organizations working to protect it, voters making decisions within it — to understand the connection between LGBTQ scapegoating and authoritarianism. Manufacturing imminent and grievous threats is a tactic that allows for power to build upon itself — endless justification for autocratic rule. If we fail to reckon with the ways autocrats are weaponizing LGBTQ scapegoating to build out the scaffolding of their movements, our democracy will pay the price.

Read Over Zero’s report here.